


real:imagine

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-11
Updated: 2011-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and John help each other out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	real:imagine

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from [in a middle of a room](http://allpoetry.com/poem/8494027-in_a_middle_of_a_room-by-e_e_cummings) by E.E. Cummings.

John comes home with his wallet significantly thinner than when he left. It’s the first time he’s slipped up in the sixteen months since returning to England; he had been doing well, fine, not thinking about it. Then Harry landed in hospital with a case of cirrhosis at barely forty, and John’s no psychiatrist, but he cringes to think that his knee-jerk reaction when confronted with his sister’s addiction is the swift resumption of his own.

He has no hope of hiding this from Sherlock. He’ll have to ask to borrow his share of the rent, and who knows what his other tells are — Sherlock will flush them out like vermin with hardly a glance. He thinks he’s kept it from Sherlock this long — at least, Sherlock’s never mentioned it, and it’s not in his nature to keep from crowing about discovering one of John’s vices if he had sussed it out. Sherlock may even be chagrinned at having missed it for so long. John climbs the stairs even as he steels himself for Sherlock’s penetrating gaze and that smug, knowing expression he’ll get on his face.

John pauses in the doorway at the top of the stairs before entering 221b. Sherlock is a long silhouette staring out the window, shoulders slumped, violin and bow hanging limply from hands dangling at his sides. He’s in a suit, but barefoot, pressed shirt wrinkled and dislodged from trousers. The atmosphere in the flat is distinctly heavy with an unnamed doom. A sense of foreboding begins to trickle into John’s chest, his stomach, his throat. He casts about looking for Sherlock’s works, but the telltale Moroccan case isn’t anywhere in sight.

“Sherlock?” he ventures.

Sherlock’s only movement is to lay his forehead against the pane of glass with a decided thunk. The bow clatters to the floor and he gives no sign of having noticed. The violin is the only thing, other than John himself, that Sherlock treats with any kind of care. John goes steady, and the flare of panic that threatened him a moment before blazes into a military calm. Whatever it is — a case, some enemy, any myriad junkie problems John has been prepared for since first finding Sherlock in a morphine-laden stupor seven months ago — John can handle it. John can get Sherlock through. He’s good at this, was born for this.

“Are you alright, Sherlock?” he tries, taking cautious steps closer.

Sherlock’s body jerks to life and he turns abruptly, pinning John with an icy gaze. He is absolutely wrecked, John realises. Whiter than he’s ever seen him, exhaustion carving lines into his face as if he’s ten years older than he is. John takes a cool, steadying breath.

“John,” Sherlock says in a flat voice. His eyes do a perfunctory sweep up and down John’s person. “Ah. I hadn’t realised.” He turns his back to John and resumes the long stare out the window at the whole lot of nothing that’s going on on Baker Street.

“Not going to rub my face in it?” John asks. He keeps his tone light and a little playful, the exact opposite of how he feels. Sherlock’s not high, he can see that. His black moods, as Sherlock calls them, don’t manifest this way — he’d be in threadbare pyjamas and an expensive dressing down, curled up somewhere, alternately brooding and haranguing John with verbal abuse, assaults against his intelligence. This is new. This puts John on edge.

“You feel enough like a failure about the entire ordeal without my input,” Sherlock says. “I will handle this month’s rent.”

John wipes his palms on the legs of his jeans. “Ta,” he says. “Won’t happen again.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, John.” Sherlock says it so plainly, without a hint of reproach or superiority. Where those would make John indignant, righteous in anger, Sherlock’s unobtrusive pronouncement fills John only with shame. He swallows, and with slow, measured movements, he leans in towards Sherlock and eases the violin from his grip. Sherlock lets him have it without argument or even acknowledgement.

“You’re right, of course,” John says. “We fight our demons every day.” He bends to pluck up the violin case, and he settles the instrument there amid the snug crushed velvet. He collects the bow and puts it in its place as well, and he snaps the case shut. He takes a seat on the sofa, Sherlock still and white, standing beside the armrest. He decides to confront whatever this is head on: “Anything I can help with?”

Sherlock turns just enough to let John see his profile, the gaunt hollows of his cheeks. He looks, impossibly, thinner than he did mere hours ago, before John left, eyes sunken, cheekbones sharp and jutting from the taut skin of his face.

“I suppose you have done this before,” he says. He faces John fully, draws himself up straight and tall, shoulders square. His eyes are storm-cloud grey. “Yes. You have experience, and I will learn by observation.” He fixes those eyes on John with unnerving intent. “Tell me, John. What did you do when your mother died?”

John’s stomach drops and his loses his grip on the tremor in his left hand. He feels weak, and he’s glad he’s already sitting.

“Oh, Sherlock. What happened?”

Sherlock cocks his head and peers at John guilelessly. He looks very young, just then. Young and old and exanamite all at once.

“Her whole life,” he says. “She… struggled, John. For as long as I knew her.” He turned back to the window. “Tell me now. Your mother.”

John swallows. His chest feels heavy, and his heart hurts. Sherlock, he has found, is full of soft vulnerable spots rarely touched by light of day, and he’s not a man who invites comfort. John wishes he knew how to offer something beyond a tea panacea.

“She was an alcoholic,” John says, and the words feel dry and brittle on his tongue. He’s never said them before. He remembers Harry last week on her hospital bed. Remembers turning around and leaving her there while she scowled at the wall. He does his level best not to remember his mother in her place, fifteen years before. “They don’t give liver transplants to people who have no intention of keeping them unpickled. She was fifty-six.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-two.”

John watches Sherlock expand with a measured breath. He fogs the window in front of his mouth.

“Do you miss her?”

John feels a cruel ache deep in the core of himself, and it’s not for the memory of his mother.

“We weren’t close,” he says carefully. “She was not the kind of woman who should have been a mother, especially after my dad left. I felt regret, and anger, and now I can admit to some wistfulness, but that’s… like being nostalgic for a dream of how our family never was. I don’t think of her that often, Sherlock, but that has no bearing on you, and your mum, and what’s happening now. Any way you feel right now… it’s all right. It’s fine. And if you need anything, I will do my level best to provide it for you.”

“I’d not seen her in over a year,” Sherlock says. Then he adds in a whisper, “But I miss her now. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”

“Absolutely not,” John says. He wants to tell Sherlock to come sit next to him, he wants to stand up beside him and pat his shoulder, he wants to unravel the messy knot that must be locking up Sherlock’s insides. Instead he sits there, clutching his own fingers in his lap and staring helplessly up at Sherlock’s sharp-boned profile, his pale neck with its Adam’s apple interruption.

“Mycroft’s secretary informed me of Mummy’s passing,” Sherlock says, “which means Mycroft himself must be… indisposed with grief. And yet I feel no satisfaction in that, John. It should be amusing: fat Mycroft’s fat tears.” And God save him, John thinks, he actually sounds confused about it.

“He’s your brother, Sherlock,” he says with a sigh, and it feels empty, hypocritical to be admonishing Sherlock for uncharitable thoughts. _She’s your mum_ or _she’s your sister_ had never worked on John, after all. He’s always resented the plain statement of fact being used as a stand-in for emotional connection, and here he is, doing the same to Sherlock of all people. “Here. I’ll make some tea. Why don’t you have a seat, and then you can tell me about your mum a little? I’d like to hear about her.”

Sherlock stares at the space beside John on the sofa like it’s some piece of evidence that doesn’t quite fit. Slowly, slowly, he moves around the arm of the sofa and takes a seat. John fancies he can hear the very creak of Sherlock’s bones when he does it, like he’d been standing in front of the window unmoving for hours. Maybe he had.

“She favoured Earl Grey,” he says, and John takes it as the gentlest command Sherlock’s ever given him.

When the tea is steeped and steaming on a tray before them, John doesn’t know what to do with his arms. Leaving them at his sides while waiting for the tea to cool is awkward, and stretching them out across the back of the sofa and encompassing Sherlock in the process is awkward, too. Suddenly, touches that would have been casual, normal, just half a day ago seem saturated with gravity now. Grief and humiliation have carved a gulf between them, and the silence is a fragile, yawning chasm. Then, Sherlock speaks.

“Mummy was a cellist,” he says, “and her degree was in Physics from Cambridge. Father had been a lecturer and thirty years her elder; they caused a small stir.”

John is quiet, looking at Sherlock’s mouth as he speaks. It quirks around the words, expressive and elastic. He tries to imagine the Holmeses as they must have been: an exceptional little unit, bound not by duty and arrangement as John might have believed before this, but by the same pull of deeply-felt love as any functional family John had ever seen.

“They were both brilliant, in their ways, but Mummy — she didn’t even walk on the same plane as the rest of us. Her star shone brighter, Father once said. I remember, he said that.” Sherlock warms his hands on his mug, but doesn’t sip. “But she had — spells, Father called them. She would lie in bed, staring at the wall. I would read to her, and she would stroke my hair. Her spells grew more frequent after Father died. I was ten.”

“Depression,” John murmurs. Only when Sherlock glances at him does he realise he’d said it aloud, and he blushes. “Sorry.”

“I resent the modern urge to diagnose people’s eccentricities,” Sherlock says, but the rebuke lacks bite. “Foibles become pathologies, quirks are medicated out of existence.” He frowns down into the steam of his tea. “And yet, I can’t help but wonder if Mummy could have been helped, if she could have been spared the — torture she underwent every day.”

And then _John_ can’t help but wonder at each of Sherlock’s own sulks and spells on the couch, his inattention to hygiene, the slip with the morphine after a particularly bad case. Suddenly those silences he indulges in seem more sinister. Bile rises in John’s gullet.

“Sherlock,” he says. He swallows convulsively and forces himself to ask. “How did your mum die?”

Sherlock gulps back too much tea at once, and John doesn’t have to be a consulting detective to see it that it burns him.

“The housekeeper found her in the bathtub,” Sherlock says, and then there’s a strangled gasp. “She was clever, John, I should be very proud. None of this adolescent pussyfooting with her wrists — she got her femoral artery on the first try.”

He stands abruptly and his mug clatters to the table and tea spills onto his fingers. He stomps to his bedroom and slams the door, and John presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Good on you, you absolute tosser,” he mutters. In the red-black space of his closed eyes, he imagines Sherlock’s mother, lifeless, suspended in red water, and his stomach lurches.

John’s left arse cheek twinges, so he shifts and removes the offending wallet from his pocket. It rushes back at him, sweeps Mummy Holmes away: the old tug at his diaphragm, the desire to go out, win it all back and then some. Logically, he knows that’s never how it works, but his restless limbs and itching gut insist otherwise. He closes his eyes again and tries for a fortifying breath.

He gets up and stands in front of Sherlock’s bedroom. It shouldn’t take so much, he thinks, to knock on your best mate’s door, but he stands there and gathers his gumption for a solid two minutes anyway. Finally, he knocks, and he hears a grumble he’ll take as acquiescence.

Sherlock is sitting on the edge of his bed. He looks very small when he meets John’s eyes.

“I need you to do me a favour,” John says. Sherlock’s lips go thin and bloodless, and John fumbles for his wallet. “This is my debit card. These are my credit cards. You — you need to keep them, just for a little while. Please.”

Sherlock’s shoulders lose a measure of their tension, and his fingers are cold where they brush against the palm of John’s hand.

“I’ll hide them,” he says, “and it’ll be a very clever spot so you shouldn’t even look, John.”

John’s smile comes out wrong, and it hurts. “Thanks,” he says. Then he gathers himself and just does what he’s wanted to since Sherlock first turned stricken eyes on him this evening: he leans over and closes his arms tight around Sherlock’s body, one arm over a shoulder, the other around his waist.

“John! What are you doing? What’s happening?” An urgent panic threads through Sherlock’s voice, but John only hugs him tighter.

“Oh come off it,” John says. “Just — let me do this for you.”

Sherlock sags a bit, then his sharp chin digs into John’s shoulder and his arms come around John, too. Sherlock’s breath is laboured, but he hangs on to John so, so tightly.


End file.
